Bathsheba at Her Bath

In the Second Book of Samuel, King David walks on the roof of his palace, sees Bathsheba bathing and, to have her, arranges the death of her husband. Zucchi painted the scene in 1573 or 1574 and put David almost out of sight, a small figure high on the left. Bathsheba sits perfuming herself after the bath, while a maid holds out a tray of little ointment jars and looks round at us. A mirror and a pair of shoes lie at her feet. The panel's own history is just as eventful. In 1908 the Italian state lent it to its embassy in Berlin, and there it vanished at the end of the Second World War. It turned up on the Berlin market, passed through a dealer in Paris, and in 1965 was bought by the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. The art historian Federico Zeri recognised it there as the missing Roman picture, and in 1998, after years of negotiation, the American museum sent it back to Rome.